Performing Installation Testing numerous times i thought of sharing some tips that can be useful for freshers and even can aid as a checklist for everyone.

As i have some broad categories for the same so i will be sharing tips regarding this crucial area of testing based upon those categories.

First lets have a look on the various types of installation testing.

1. Fresh Installation of software:

>Which refers to the fresh platform(OS) on which software needs to install.

>An OS will be considered as fresh if no other/same version of that software is install ever, other software may be

present.

2. Upgrade of existing software with new version:

>In this scenario, an older version of same software is already installed on Platform (OS) and we need to upgrade to latest version.

>We should always test, if installing same version of software which is present in OS.

>The result depends on the requirement, if requirement says software can be upgraded by same version then it should allow. Otherwise it should prompt message that same version of software is already installed.

>Sometimes it happens that when trying to run installation of same version the software gives option to uninstall, we should test this scenario too.

3.Upgrading of platform (OS) :

>when a new OS is launched in market having option to upgrade from previous OS version. Suppose, client is using OS as XP and

software is installed on it. Now new version of OS (Vista) is released into market a need to test that after OS is upgraded to Vista, the software is still running as expected.

>If not, then we will need to provide patch to fix the same.

4.Un-Installation of the software:

>In this scenario we test that after un-installing the software , all files that were created on the system got removed or not; registry entry are removed or not;shortcut created during installation is removed or installation system is cleaned/fresh or not.